A majority of residential housing units built in the U.S. from the 1960's through the late 1990's utilized wall-to-wall carpeting as an aesthetically pleasing and relatively inexpensive alternative to labor intensive and messy hardwood flooring installation. With the introduction of new hardwood flooring systems including the beautiful and trouble free installation of pre-finished styles, homeowners find many more design choices to consider as they remodel. As the carpeting is removed to accommodate installation of new flooring, however, homeowners quickly find that their staircases may have been constructed using plywood, and will require extensive renovation.
Removing the existing staircase and replacing it with hardwood steps to match the new flooring choice is an expensive and time consuming proposition. Hence, it is more economical to cover the existing stairs in much the same way that the existing floor is covered with the new pre-finished flooring product.
However, current construction methods for overlay stair treads yield an appearance which is deficient in aesthetic appeal and inefficient in the use of raw materials. An overlay stair tread on which the bull nose and scotia element (or cove molding) are attached vertically with relation to the horizontal surface of the tread yields a differentiation in grain direction between the two pieces, and yields a “striped” appearance after staining and finishing. This is shown, for example, in U.S. Pat. Nos. 8,141,321 and 8,371,090.
Further, because of mandated dimensional requirements on Building Codes, vertically attached bull nose elements must be manufactured from expensive and in some cases rare or non-existent 5-4 raw material as opposed to the 4-4 stock which can be used for the stair tread overlay.
Accordingly, there exists a need in the marketplace for an improved stair tread overlay and a method of manufacturing the same.